


The Old King Is Dead / Long Live The King

by TheSaintRyan



Category: The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time
Genre: Gen, Gerudo Culture, Political Intrigue, Usurpers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-11
Updated: 2019-03-11
Packaged: 2019-11-15 09:30:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18070805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSaintRyan/pseuds/TheSaintRyan
Summary: The boy takes charge. The sisters take a knee. The city becomes a vault; the city becomes a hideout; the city becomes a monument to greed. The same old song dissonant with the new song. The edges roughed around. The sandstone shredded in the wind.*A male is born to the Gerudo every one hundred years. What of the time in between kings?





	The Old King Is Dead / Long Live The King

Finally, the old man has passed. Sixty years of foolish rule and greed and subservience wiped away like footprints on the dunes. Privately, deep in her home, face buried into her pillow, she grins when she hears the news. His era had ended, and she looks toward the future like watching the sun rise.

She has so little time, and so much to do. Conversations to whisper in dark corners; debts to repay; favors to call in. She is a great spider, stretching her many legs out amidst the twitching vibrations on her wide web. She had missed this, this control and power, but her time had ended and been interrupted and now it had began again. She had always known this would pass. She had always known most things. She talks and she sidles and she sneaks around. She prepares everything she can, exerts all of her reach, views the shining haze of the future she’s forging in her image. She returns home and she rests her hand on the brow of her daughter and she looks into her sleeping face and she sees the great placid power of the Goddess in the Colossus. She sees the glimmering mirage: The bright golden light of the Triforce; the witches in the temple; the shifting dunes rewriting themselves constantly; the foolishness of man. She sees it all and she knows it all.

_come here my darling_

She tends to the pregnancies, she welcomes their sisters home from their pilgrimage and she cradles hundreds of little girls until the day she cradles a boy. He looks up at her with topaz eyes and in them she sees the pure power of the sun; all the bright burning frigid malice of the desert condensed. His eyes are neutral and clever and full of mannish greed that she recognizes a hundred times over.

Her daughter’s training intensifies; she must be ready to rule; she must be ready to blend into the darkest parts of the city and temple and endure the buffeting of these new tides. The wind has been shifting; rewriting the dunes anew, smelling like frost and bitter like magic and sweet like sacrifice. Her daughter is outmatched; but aren’t they all?

Years pass on. The boy is a great thief - her daughter will always be better - and his wicked clever mind grows quickly - but experience is worth more than all best laid plans - and her own eyes tell her the story’s ending so she does not fret. Enormous forces like the weight of gravity pull the pages along predictably. Her eyes tell her when the tide begins to pull back from shore, her eyes tell her when the rivers are fullest and spilling over, and her eyes tell her when the era of man will end before it has even begun.

_listen well to your mother’s words_

Years and years and a whole new desert and a whole new music on the winds. Her daughter is everything she ever was and more still. Her daughter wields the weight on her back like it is great powerful wings across her shoulders. She wields the title of usurper like a crown; which of course it is sometimes. The Goddess’ song changes, the words show her the path across the sand, the words are breezes which cover her tracks, the words are a map.

The boy takes charge. The sisters take a knee. The city becomes a vault; the city becomes a hideout; the city becomes a monument to greed. The same old song dissonant with the new song. The edges roughed around. The sandstone shredded in the wind. She takes a knee but grins at the image in the sand on the floor. Her entire life has revolved around a crown she has never worn, a crown she will never wear. Her entire life has revolved around this rigid, unmoving weight. Her entire life has revolved around the sprawling threads of her web.

She finds her daughter in the temple, deep within the furthest corners where no child should be able to reach, curled up in the center of one of the Goddess’ open palms. Like she’s offering herself up; like she is smoke about to rise up into the mouth of the Goddess. She looks into her daughter’s eyes and sees herself, laying right there, her mother’s hand on her brow, and she sees her mother, and her mother, and her mother.

The men are born every hundred years, but rarely live even half of that time. When the air is hot and rises up, other air must move across to take its place. Nothing can remain empty forever. Once this new king has been defeated; the sisters will carry on. The sisters will listen again to the song of the Goddess and forget the discordant notes of His song. And her dear girl will be the most important piece in all the puzzle. The cornerstone. The foundational anchor. The nexus around which this all will revolve.

_my darling, Nabooru, Queen of the Gerudo_

**Author's Note:**

> Soooooo I don't know what this is. I wanted to write about Nabooru I guess. This is what happened. From the perspective of Nabooru's mother.


End file.
